Sunday, December 12, 2010

John Lott - Obama Hater

Referring to the remarks made by the President the other day, Mr. Lott named a post, "Obama's whopper of a claim at the press conference on Tuesday." Lott graciously provided links to the speech as well as a list of broken promises.

What I thought is Obama's speech-writers carefully worded the comment in such a way that it could not be called a lie or a "whopper." What do you think?

There is not a single thing that I said I would do that I have not done or tried to do.

I've made no secret of the fact that I no longer support President Obama. Escalation of the war in Afghanistan was the last straw, but this tax deal really solidified my cynicism. Yet, I find John Lott's response, like so many long-standing Obama-haters, to be more a reflection of his own bias and prejudice than the President's failure. Ignoring the "or tried to do," part of the statement and arguing instead that he did not keep all his promises, is intellectually dishonest.

What's your opinion? By the way, isn't it odd that the books John Lott wrote are all about guns and the blog is all about politics?

2 comments:

During the 2008 presidential campaign Obama repeatedly made the promise to cut net government spending. He blamed the deficit on out of control spending and he blamed the bad economy in October 2008 on the deficit. "And what I've proposed, you'll hear Senator McCain say, well, [I'm] proposing a whole bunch of new spending, but actually I'm cutting more than I'm spending so that it will be a net spending cut," that promise was made during the second presidential debate against John McCain. As if that wasn't clear enough, he repeated his commitment to reduce spending in his third debate: "Now, what I've done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut." In the first presidential debate, Mr. Obama attacked Republicans for an "orgy of spending and enormous deficits," promising that he was actually going to eliminate the deficit by reducing spending.

Please provide me any evidence that Obama has "tried to" cut total government spending since he became president.

Even excluding spending on TARP, bailouts for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and deposit insurance (since they are temporary spending items and Democrats could argue that he isn't responsible for them), federal spending during the first two years of his presidency has soared by 21.4 percent.

As to the rest of you post, not "all" my books are about guns (three of the six are on guns).

Finally, let me note that I knew Obama at the University of Chicago Law School where we both taught. If you think that I am making the comments about the broken promises out of malice, please provide some evidence. One good place to start would be to show that my point about the broken promises was inaccurate. By the way, I have also written positive pieces in the past on Biden.

John Lott said, "If you think that I am making the comments about the broken promises out of malice, please provide some evidence."

Isn't that just like a pro-gun writer to demand evidence for something like that.

John, I never claimed to be a mindreader. So what your real motivations are I wouldn't know, and I certainly wouldn't have any "evidence" to support my impressions.

My impressions are, however, that you are one of the many Obama Haters. Reading your blog gives me that impression. I don't have the time or the interest to pick the many examples of exaggerations and spinning you employ over there. Obviously you won't admit anything.